Pages

Monday, August 27, 2007

Jesus is my boyfriend

Mother Teresa’s dark night of the soul has been getting a lot of buzz lately, due to published excerpts of her private correspondence:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html

These revelations will hardly tarnish her reputation as a popular saint. To the contrary, I’m sure they will enhance her reputation.

Her devotees will react in the same way that theological liberals responded to The Last Temptation of Christ. They will read about her turmoil and exclaim, “I can relate to her! She’s one of us! Better than us, but still one of us. She may be a saint, but she’s not a plaster saint!”

It will make them feel saintly just to have something in common with Mother Teresa.

In addition, they will feel that her ubiquitous doubts are downright meritorious. She was faithfully faithless to the bitter end. How noble! How selfless!

Now, the way many people feel about Mother Teresa is interchangeable from the way many other people feel about Elvis Presley or Princess Diana. They bond with celebrities as if these strangers were their very own mothers or brothers or sisters.

Indeed, there’s a sense in which celebrities are better than family because you don’t actually have to live with them day in and day out. The charm would wear off rather quickly if their teary-eyed fantasies came into direct contact with the hot pavement of reality.

But for those of us who are not caught up in the cult of celebrity or the cult of the saints (a distinction without a difference), how should we evaluate Mother Teresa’s experience?

1.Some men and women lack a sense of God’s presence in their lives for the rather straightforward reason that God is, in one important sense, absent from their lives. They don’t sense his presence because they are dead in their sins. They remain strangers to grace.

I’m not saying for a fact that Mother Teresa was unregenerate. But if she keeps telling us that God wasn’t real to her, maybe we should take her at her word. Maybe she didn’t experience God—in the way his sheep know their Shepherd.

You can be very devout, and still be very dead in your sins. A pious Hindu or Muslim is very dead in his sins.

2.However, that’s not the only interpretation. One thing that leaps off the page as you read about her complaints is the practical impact of bad theology. And this operates at several levels.

This means that if you’re emotionally dry, you will be spiritually dry. If you’re miserable, this will depress your faith.

For your faith is not something other than you. It’s a part of you. You are a believer. You are also a human being. Whatever affects you as a human being affects you as a believer.

3.One of Mother Teresa’s problems was the lack of a normal family life. Her father died when she was 8 years old. And, of course, she never married.

It is any wonder that she was lonely? Isn’t there a fairly obvious and humdrum explanation for her loneliness?

When you lose a parent, you lose someone irreplaceable—at least in this life. And this cuts deeper if you lose a parent during your formative years.

But, ordinarily, life does afford some emotional compensations for the loss of a parent or grandparent or sibling. For you develop other relationships, in terms of friendship and especially a family of your own—which compensate for your loss. They don’t make up for the loss, but at least there’s more to life than one loss after another. There are gains as well as losses. Not a chronic hemorrhage without transfusions.

4.By contrast, Catholic piety makes a virtue of misery. A woman like Mother Teresa goes out of her way to make herself miserable by denying herself the natural blessings of life. She then bemoans her self-inflicted misery.

There’s a sadistic side and viciously ingrown quality to Catholic piety. Make yourself miserable. Convince yourself that you’re doing this for God. Then pat yourself on the back for your praiseworthy unworthiness.

5.This spiritual conceit is ratcheted up several notches by imagining that you can share in the Passion of Christ. You literally identify with his agony on the cross. Your dark night of the soul mirrors his dark night of the soul on Good Friday and Holy Saturday. You recapitulate Holy Week in your own heart and soul.

6.She also suffers from a false expectation. In a fallen world, God does, in some measure, maintain radio silence. Sin does, indeed, alienate us from God. Up to a point, the silence of God is part and parcel of the Fall—although God’s silence is by no means unbroken.

7.Never having had a husband or boyfriend, Jesus becomes her boyfriend. After all, she’s a nun, and a nun is literally married to Christ.

But Jesus proves to be a very neglectful and distracted boyfriend. He can’t make time for her. She makes a lunch date, but he stands her up. He doesn’t return her phone calls. Or send her birthday cards. Or a dozen roses on Valentine’s Day.

And because Mother Teresa lived and died within the warped world of Rome, no one ever pointed out to her that perhaps, just perhaps, her problem was not with an illusory Jesus, but with an illusory image of Jesus.

8.Finally she has a very unrealistic grasp of what it means to experience the reality of God. For her, God is absent unless he’s present in some extraordinary way. A mystical encounter. Signs and wonders. Visions and auditions. Trumpets and fireworks.

She doesn’t perceive the existence of God because of where she’s looking for God. She isn’t looking for God in the ordinary and the mundane, so she ends up overlooking God as she stumbles over God every step of the way.

Mother Teresa is like a tourist who bought a ticket to the Museo Picasso. By purchasing a ticket, she was hoping to meet Picasso in person. Have a private audience with the artist.

But as she wanders the galleries, lined with Picassos, she can’t find Picasso. “Where is Picasso?” she asks, as she stands behind a row of Picassos, facing another row of Picassos, with Picassos on either side.

Wall-to-wall Picassos. Every surface covered by Picassos. But even though the paintings are staring her in the face, she’s utter blind to the existence of the painter.

She leaves the Museo Picasso deeply disillusioned. Now she doubts the existence of Picasso. If Picasso is real, why wasn’t he there?

Mother Teresa could never see the light because she was searching for a candle at noonday. Surrounded by light, she lived in darkness. Tunnel vision, created by the cardboard blinkers she wore.

Her powers of recognition were distorted by her pious expectations. Sunshine didn’t count. Unless the light could take the form of some portent or prodigy—a solar eclipse or comet—then all was darkness and night.

How could Jesus give her the silent treatment? It doesn’t even occur to her that you can hear Jesus speaking in the four gospels or the seven letters to the churches of Asia Minor. She can’t hear the voice of Christ because she’s tuned him out. Her radio is set to a different frequency.

That’s because Catholicism is not a Word-centered faith. It is geared to the eyes rather than the ears. To the sacraments and the Beatific Vision. And, from that standpoint, even the sacraments become a wall rather than a window.

She also made many universalist-type comments which tells me she did not understand the basic gospel message.

While I have no way of knowing whether she had saving faith or not (and perhaps just battled depression?), her misunderstanding of the gospel and the darkness she conveys in her letters tells me it it may be over optimistic to solidify her presence in heaven through beatification.

BTW, your comments of how Catholics will receive this news is dead on. In a Catholic Answers forum people were ecstatic that M. Teresa was "just like us" and persevered in her faith despite the darkness.

Mainstream media has no concept of the "blue-note" in Christianity- doesn't fit their image of a religious person. So when a popular Christian person goes through the "dark night of the soul" they have no idea how to interpret it. Maybe they should go read the Psalms instead of Joel Osteen for once.

While I do not know if Mother Theresa was a Christian or not. I do not know what comments she made whether universialist or not. But I have to say that this post seemed a little too harsh. She lived in a crazy area in which she dealt with a lot of people who were dead or dying. I think we have it easy in some senses here because we do not ahve to deal with the real pains of life and death and suffering all that often.

Also what is wrong with equating our suffering with the suffering of Christ. That is we can maybe share in the fellowship of his sufferings? Didn't Paul say something like that in Phillipians 3. And while baptism might be a way that we share in his sufferings I think Paul also had in mind the real sufferings we have in this world as we live for Christ.

I do not think her going through the dark night of the soul means that she probably was not a Christian. I think it is part of our Christian pilgrimage as is loneliness. I am married but there is still loneliness. That is just a part of life. So I think one should just be a little more charitable to Mother Theresa wihtout making her a saint above everyone else especially when many did not really even know her at all.

I'm not a Roman Catholic - in fact, I'm a minister in good standing in a Reformed federation, and a Ph.D. candidate in theology. I'm a Reformed minister and theologian.

Yet, this post literally has nauseated me. It is harsh, presumptuous, simplistic, and in my opinion evidences a sad lack of acquaintance with virtue and charity.

I do not presume to know Mother Teresa's motives or eternal destiny. But I do know that before I would ever attempt to exegete her life and motives in any way, I'd spend the next 40 year of my life picking up my cross, denying myself, and devoting my life to raising the poor from the dust. I'd spend the rest of my life practicing true religion by visiting orphans and widows in their affliction.

I've been fortunate not to have been so sheltered in American culture and modern evangelicalism so as to not understand the plight of those who live in absolute destitution - physical, moral, material, emotional, spiritual. Unfortunately, I've not been as fortunate so as to have given more of myself to serve God in this matter.

I'm not a regular reader of this blog, so maybe I shouldn't be giving my unsolicited opinion. But I couldn't help but express how you have made this day a little darker for my soul. Then again, it's my fault I came here and kept reading, mistake which I'll not repeat.

"I'm not a Roman Catholic - in fact, I'm a minister in good standing in a Reformed federation, and a Ph.D. candidate in theology. I'm a Reformed minister and theologian...I'm not a regular reader of this blog, so maybe I shouldn't be giving my unsolicited opinion. But I couldn't help but express how you have made this day a little darker for my soul. Then again, it's my fault I came here and kept reading, mistake which I'll not repeat."

How convenient that any method of verifying your claims as to your identity are now impossible. And since your criticism of this blog is rather dependent upon the credibility of your identity claims, why should anyone reading it take it seriously?

Also, it's interesting that you judge the quality of the entire blog by one post yet tell the writers at Triablogue to be less judgmental. This seems to suggest a double standard.

i do not know about Mr. Anomynous. I am no troll. I used to be reformed but I do not know if that it an aplicable title for me now. I have read too much of the church fathers. ;) But anyways I think the post was too harsh but Mr. Anonymous was too harsh against the post.

Hi there, Steve. I am a Christian, but I could relate to Teresa's experience. Is it possible that a true Christian can sometimes have the "dark night," where God doesn't seem real to him or near to him ... or are such "dark nighters" always reprobate non-christians?

i ask because i struggle with assurance of salvation some times for months...and the struggle itself seems to confirm my fears.

Anonymous said:Hi there, Steve. I am a Christian, but I could relate to Teresa's experience. Is it possible that a true Christian can sometimes have the "dark night," where God doesn't seem real to him or near to him ... or are such "dark nighters" always reprobate non-christians?

i ask because i struggle with assurance of salvation some times for months...and the struggle itself seems to confirm my fears.